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This week's pocket reading list : Week 1 of Nov

The WWII-Era Plane Giving the F-35 a Run for Its Money : It's interesting the hear that while technology has been making war more and more sophisticated, there have been people who are keen on using less-technologically advanced machines. This is the specific case where an older (turbo-propeller driven) plane is being preferred for ground support, instead of the more technologically advanced flying machines, as they are better at it than the rest.

How Politics Shaped General Relativity - It's almost been a 100 years since Einstein proposed the General Theory of Relativity, which gave rise to cosmology and helped us understand the universe as a whole. It's interesting to read about how the political ideologies of the time (WWI-WWII) contributed to adoption or dismissal of the theory in various parts of the world.

The things feminism has improved for me: A male perspective : A very interesting article that elaborates on the underlying principle - "Knowledge is Power". I guess we can also relate it to what Feynmann said about being able to appreciate a flower more, having a better understanding of the science behind it.

A Roundup of Dust Devil Research : If you don't know, Dust Devils are miniature versions of tornadoes or hurricanes or twisters. Well, there's a fundamental thing differentiating them - whether they start from the surface or from the clouds but let's keep that aside for now. A brilliant article on dust devils on MARS(!!!) and their frequency and what we can understand about the atmosphere and surface of the planet given their rate of incidence and ferocity. Also, The Planetary Society is awesome.

Life in a Studio Apartment with my Wife and Two Sons : A beautiful tale of minimalistic living, I would say. With rising prices for accommodation in the urban areas, most adults are restricted to small living spaces. Things are worse in Beijing but that's a whole other story. The author talks about how they dealt with space constraints once he got married and had two kids.

The War Over Genome Editing Just Got a Lot More Interesting : What I took away from this article is the fact that bacteria have ways to keep viruses at bay and that bacterial DNA has bits and pieces of virus DNA that are used to identify and destroy a virus if it infects the bacteria. That's something that I would like to read more about.

Ramanujan surprises again : People keep finding that Ramanujan had worked on things wayy before anyone else had. This is one such account where Srinivasa Ramanujan had worked on elliptic curves.

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